“Take it and stab me!” she ordered. “Stab--if you blame me for your brother's death! I should have known him for your brother if I had come on him in the dark!--His head might have come from your shoulders!--You were like a man holding up his own head, as I have seen in pictures in a book! I would never have killed him!”
Her golden hair fell all about his shoulders, and its scent was not intended to be sobering. She ran warm fingers through his hair while she held the knife toward him with the other hand.
“Take it and stab!”
“No,” he said.
“No!” she laughed. “No! You are my warrior--my man--my well--beloved! You have come to me alone out of all the world! You would no more stab me than the gods would forget me!”
Their eyes were on each other's--deep looking into deep.
“Strength!” she said, flinging him away and leaning back to look at him, almost as a fed cat stretches in the sunlight. “Courage! Simplicity! Directness! Strength I have, too, and courage never failed me, but my mind is a river winding in and out, gathering as it goes. I have no directness--no simplicity! You go straight from point to point, my sending from the gods! I have needed you! Oh, I have needed you so much, these many years! And now that you have come you want to hate me because you think I killed your brother! Listen--I will tell you all I know about your brother.”'
Without a scrap of proof of any kind he knew she was telling truth unadorned--or at least the truth as she saw it. Eye to eye, there are times when no proof is needed.
“Without my leave, Muhammad Anim sent five hundred men on a foray toward the Khyber. Bull-with-a-beard needed an Englishman's head, for proof for a spy of his who could not enter Khinjan Caves. They trapped your brother outside Ali Masjid with fifty of his men. They took his head after a long fight, leaving more than a hundred of their own in payment.
“Bull-with-a-beard was pleased. But he was careless, and I sent my men to steal the head from his men. I needed evidence for you. And I swear to you--I swear to you by my gods who have brought us two together--that I first knew it was your brother's head when you held it up in the Cavern of Earth's Drink! Then I knew it could not be anybody else's head!”